Nanjing Duck
Envisioned to be a multi-sensory theatrical work integrating movement, music, and culinary art.
Note: This is a demo clip, intended to showcase the composition prior to final production with live musicians.
Instrumentation:
Guqin, Suona (Chinese traditional instruments), Alto Sax, Piano, Cello and a Tanggu (traditional Chinese drum)
Length: 35-40 min
It's a work in progress.
Nanjing Duck is written for a quartet of piano, cello, guqin, and suona (the latter two being traditional Chinese instruments, with the suona player doubling on saxophone), performed alongside a group of dancers. At the center of the ensemble sits a tanggu (a traditional Chinese drum) that each musician plays in turn during their rests to create punctuations and pulses throughout the piece.
The quartet traces the meticulous, multi-day process of preparing Nanjing Duck, a signature dish from my hometown. Rather than depicting the physical actions literally, it unfolds the emotional landscape behind — a journey of effort, patience, and acute anticipation. Having lived abroad for years, I have never encountered this ubiquitous hometown dish elsewhere. Its absence evokes a deep longing for the taste of home. From frustration and even anger while plucking the duck’s feathers to moments of philosophical reflection on identity and belonging, this piece maps my personal narrative onto the culinary ritual.
Beyond the linear storytelling of this cooking marathon, I’m most interested in evoking the collectively shared experience. This piece is about nostalgia for the food that shaped us, about international identities seeking familiarity far from home. It is also an acknowledgment of life’s mundane gifts, so ordinary they verge on the absurd, yet precisely through that absurdity, we may approach meaning and peace in this war-sustaining world.
As humans, we are masters of language, yet words often fall short. For instance, I perceive sound through smell and taste—a synesthetic experience that defies description yet compelled me to write this music. I’m thus drawn to performance forms that communicate beyond words. I envision this quartet more than a concert piece, but as a platform for dance theatre, integrating projections, costumes, lighting, and set design. Ideally developed into a full production in a venue with a kitchen, the performance would culminate in the actual roasting of a duck. By the end, the audience would be invited to taste a piece of my home, engaging all five senses. As friends have described it, this is conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art.